#seth.

[miju-khan]

"So's running a business," Miju points out. If anything, he thinks he's probably had to do less work than Seth. At any rate, his is more flexible. Business has to open when customers want it. If Miju needs a break, he can take it whenever he needs, so long as the work gets done in time for deadlines.

His mouth quirks up in amusement at the elephant comment. "Hardly. Elephants don't get any enrichment out of doing it; they're trained to paint using horribly abusive methods, and they draw the same thing every time because it's the thing they've been trained to draw, line by excruciating line. Just because something's in a museum, that doesn't mean it's good. It just means it's expensive, sometimes, and people have a real habit of putting value on all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons."

The suggestion of a tutor has Seth briefly wondering about their availability too, but there's something wistful in the way Miju answers that has him keeping the tasteless comment to himself. This artist holds an unusual amount of cards in their arrangement, and Seth knows he's one tacky misstep away from artistic blue balls. "Sounds like a lot of fucking work," he groans, as impressed as he is exhausted by the idea: poring over books has never been Seth's preferred activity, and even the words 'theory' and 'scale' and 'perspective' sound suspiciously more mathematic than artistic. "If it's not innate talent, then why do we have paintings in museums done by elephants? Things just hold the brush in their trunks and paint up a masterpiece."

[jin-leizu]

"And what time do you call this?" Seth can't win; not with Leizu. He arrives when summoned? Should have been early. Arrives early? He's disrespecting her time; she might still have been busy. And arriving late? Well, it goes without saying. Nonetheless, she continues to make infrequent... invitations to him. She has found that he is more pliant than many might think: not a terrible outlet for Leizu's frustrations. @all-cf-me

[milesworld96]

If Cody and Seth win tonight imma cry, they CANNOT win tonight

Absolutely not

[seraphiimx]

where. somewhere over a rainbow perhaps who. @sethlozano

"So... I see you've gone through a little upgrade," it was more statement than question, for Ángel could sense the difference in the other. Even well hidden, there had been no denying that Seth was no longer simply a vampire. "Were you tired of being so short and so young? Had to get a one up on the rest of us?"

[sable-hart]

"This dehumanising wolf bullshit is exactly why he's gonna see through you one day." Metaphorical or not, it's exactly how people talk to, or about, Richard when they want to use him. Like he's some dog, like he's worthy of less respect than a regular human just because of his mutation. "And you might recall that I wasn't the one pulling him anywhere. He's the one that proposed to me. He wanted that life. You just really can't stand that he almost, for a minute, prioritised something other than your desperate, grifting ass, can you?"

The sensible part of Sable is begging her to stop, somewhere in the back of her mind. She can see the blood on his teeth; smell the sharp metallic cut of it in the air. Now is the time to back off and leave, before it gets any worse. And yet she can't stop herself from responding, because Seth simply does this to her. God help her but the sight of blood in his mouth, blood that she drew, makes her feel goddamn proud. That's what Seth does to her, makes her into a hateful, bloodthirsty bitch.

Seth thinks he's been prepared for Sable to lash out at him this entire time, if not outright daring her to do so, but he's proven wrong as she throws him back against the wall by the shirt and slaps him right across the face. He's been slapped plenty over the years, but this one has so much hate behind it that her manicured nails rake the skin white across his cheek, and the force of it rings through his skull for at least the first half of her monologue... it's only out of slow-building venom that he waits for her to finish, letting his head fall back against the wall.

"Don't talk to me about respect." If Sable's voice is a hiss, Seth's is a snarl. "You pull a wolf right out of the wild, keep it locked up in your house, give him a little dog bowl and a cute little bed and expect him to be happy, then you're so fuckin' surprised when he bites?"

A crooked grin hitches onto his face, and his smoke-stained teeth are tinged with pink: he leans in good and close so she can smell the blood she drew. "But hey, you keep telling yourself I take advantage of him, huh? It's easier to hate me than admit your good boy is still a fucking wolf."

[livndie4luv13]

seth. seth stop. seth i can’t do this. seth.

[ulyuxe]

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

[welcometomeloxia]

[hawberries]

Seth Lowell and the bad bitch he pulled by being autistic

[tscsunlover]

got my rainbow crate all for the game books! Im gonna add the bonus chapters here for anyone who didn’t buy the books cause they were EXPENSIVE

links aren’t working for some reason and you can only add ten pictures to a post so i’m gonna add the next two books in reposts

THE FOXHOLE COURT BONUS CHAPTERS SPOILERS BELOW

[animentality]

[kikipuff]

Kevin, leaning over Seth’s coffin: how could you do this to us, we’re so short staffed.

[stalebagels]

Edit: muted this monstrosity but if you're looking for the blank template it's on my blog and I'll tag this and it with "the stupid fucking shorts post" so you don't have to scroll through everything 💀😂 (I did not make the template btw, I don't know who the OP is but if you do please let me know)

[mixsethaddams]

“Oh my god you’re a writer? Can I read your stuff?”

[jojowentbananas]

I LOVE SETH AND JANE SO MUCH AAAAA I cannot shut up about them

[lillyrob]

Actual footage of me patently waiting for my favorite author to upload😫😫😫